
Yijun Sun
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Profile
Yijun Sun is a media historian and theorist researching how the interaction between technology, materiality, and the human body shapes digital media and their precursors. Her work sits at the intersection of media theory, the history of technology, and cultural studies, with a focus on power, materiality, and embodiment. Yijun’s current book project centers on “media vessels” in electronic media history, exploring how everyday carriers, such as containers, play a crucial role in enabling and sustaining technological systems. Her other projects address embodied visuality in virtual and real space, histories of computer screens and electronic imaging, feminist technics in media history, and material histories of artificial intelligence.
Yijun is set to receive her Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her essays appear in journals such as Cultural Critique (link) and Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies (link). Her latest co-authored chapter, “Carried Away: The Carrier Bag Theory of Media,” is featured in Technics: Media in the Digital Age (Link to the book). Yijun’s research has been supported by institutions including the Hagley Museum & Library, and she has been a research fellow at the Collaborative Research Center “Media of Cooperation” at the University of Siegen.
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Publications
Journal Articles
Yijun Sun (2023). “From Glows to Graphics: The Invention of Visuality in Early Electronic Media Systems.” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, vol 29, issue 5, pp. 1136-1150. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565231193954.
Yijun Sun (2023). “The Desire to See: Binary Systems, Architectural Space, and the Ontology of Being-with.” Cultural Critique, issue 118, pp. 1-22. DOI: 10.1353/cul.2023.0007.
Book ChaptersYijun Sun and Bernard Geoghegan (2024). “Carried Away: The Carrier Bag Theory of Media.” In Technics: Media in the Digital Age, “The Key Debates” series, edited by Nicholas Baer and Annie van den Oever. Amsterdam University Press (Peer-reviewed), pp. 169-186. https://www.aup.nl/en/book/9789048564552/technics.
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